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1. The Barefoot Investor (Scott Pape)

This is the only money guide you’ll ever need.

That’s a bold claim, given there are already thousands of finance books on the shelves.

So what makes this one different?

Well, you won’t be overwhelmed with a bunch of ‘tips’ … or a strict budget (that you won’t follow). You’ll get a step-by-step formula: open this account, then do this; call this person, and say this; invest money here, and not there. All with a glass of wine in your hand.

This book will show you how to create an entire financial plan that is so simple you can sketch it on the back of a serviette … and you’ll be able to manage your money in 10 minutes a week.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

This book is full of stories from everyday Aussies — single people, young families, empty nesters, retirees — who have applied the simple steps in this book and achieved amazing, life-changing results.

And you’re next.

Australia’s avifauna is large, diverse and spectacular, reflecting the continent’s impressive range of habitats and evolutionary history. With specially commissioned paintings of over 900 species, The Australian Bird Guide is the most comprehensive field guide to Australian birds ever seen.

The guide features around 4700 colour illustrations, with particular emphasis on providing the fine detail required to identify difficult groups and distinctive plumages. Comprehensive species accounts have been written by a dedicated team of ornithologists to ensure identification details, distribution and status are current and accurate.

The Australian Bird Guide sets a new standard in field guides, providing an indispensable reference for all birders and naturalists looking to explore Australia’s magnificent and unique birdlife.

3. Cruden Farm Diaries (Michael Morrison)

Cruden Farm was given to the late Dame Elisabeth Murdoch in 1928 as a wedding present from her husband Sir Keith Murdoch. The farm at Langwarrin, about 50 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, was a place she cherished throughout her long life. The beautiful garden she created there with gardener, Michael Morrison, is one of Australia’s finest.

In 1984 Michael began to keep garden diaries, a practice that endures to this day. He writes of the plants that have thrived and those they’ve lost, of terrible heat and freak storms, of escaped cows and memorable parties. The diaries recount the plans he and Dame Elisabeth hatched, the triumphs and tensions, the sheer fun of making a garden together.

In an age preoccupied with selfies and spotlight chasers, Michael Morrison’s diaries remind us of a different way of living – of more than forty years spent quietly but passionately dedicated to one special garden and its unique owner.

4. Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell (Louise Milligan)

George Pell is the most recognisable face of the Australian Catholic Church. He was the Ballarat boy with the film-star looks who studied at Oxford and rose through the ranks to become the Vatican’s indispensable ‘Treasurer’. As an outspoken defender of church orthodoxy, ‘Big George’s’ ascendancy within the clergy was remarkable and seemingly unstoppable.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse has brought to light horrific stories about sexual abuse of the most vulnerable and provoked public anger at the extent of the cover-up. George Pell has always portrayed himself as the first man in the Church to tackle the problem. But questions about what the Cardinal knew, and when, have persisted.

The nation’s most prominent Catholic is now the subject of a police investigation into allegations spanning decades that he too abused children. Louise Milligan is the only Australian journalist who has been privy to the most intimate stories of complainants.

She pieces together a series of disturbing pictures of the Cardinal’s knowledge and his actions, many of which are being told here for the first time.

Conspiracy or cover-up? Cardinal uncovers uncomfortable truths about a culture of sexual entitlement, abuse of trust and how ambition can silence evil.

5. Fifteen Young Men (Paul Kennedy)

It was a maritime tragedy that unfolded one sad, dark hour at a time. A cold, cruelly blustery night revealing – with agonising slowness – that fifteen young men of the Mornington Football Club would never make it home. As dawn broke and families began to mourn, a nation was to learn the full extent of one of the world’s worst sporting disasters.

The sinking of the Process in catastrophically rough seas off Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 1892, with the loss of all on board, horrified Australia. ‘Such an accident has no parallel in our land’s history,’ reported The Argus. Yet somehow, for more than a century, this calamitous event slipped from Australia’s consciousness.

In Fifteen Young Men, journalist Paul Kennedy reveals the stories behind the tragedy. In his compelling evocation of a spirited Australian town on the cusp of a new century, he captures the trauma of families and friends suffering almost unbearable loss, but also the irrepressible optimism of the times, and the mateship, love and resilience that would come to define a budding nation.

6. Work Strife Balance (Mia Freedman)

This book is for every woman who’s been told success is as simple as Lean In, Say Yes, Live Your Best Life, Beat Your Fear, Follow Your Dream… and then feel #soblessed.

It’s for guilty friends, bad mums, crap wives, imperfect feminists, rebellious daughters and any girl with a big mouth and at least one foot in it. It’s for any woman who’s ever asked: ‘Am I the only one who isn’t quite coping?’

Here is Mia Freedman’s low road to the top – a fearless, hilarious, inspiring and surprising collection of modern misadventures to read, relate to and rejoice in, then share with all the women in your life.

7. Depends What You Mean By Extremist (John Safran)

No one turns up where they’re not wanted quite like John Safran. In this hilarious and disorienting adventure he gets among our diverse community of white nationalists, ISIS supporters, anarchists and more, digging away at the contradictions that many would prefer be left unexamined. Who is this black puppet-master among the white nationalists? And this Muslim fundamentalist who geeks out on Monty Python? Is there a secret radicalisation network operating in John’s own Jewish suburb? And ultimately – is hanging with all these radicals washing off on John himself?

Populated by an extraordinary cast of ‘ordinary’ Australians, Depends What You Mean by Extremist is a startling, confronting portrait of contemporary Australia. We all think we know what’s going on in our own country, but this larger-than-life, timely, and alarmingly insightful true story will make you think again . . .

8. Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen (Annie Smithers)

Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen is a window on the bucolic world of acclaimed Victorian chef Annie Smithers. A handsome, gifty package, it includes a best-of selection of three and four-course menus collected by Annie over the three years of her restaurant, du Fermier, in Trentham. While part of du Fermier’s appeal is undeniably its charming central Victorian location, this farmhouse-style eatery is the sort of place intrepid food lovers might equally stumble across in rural France or Dorset or California.

Annie’s food is classic French Provincial, presented with a distinct pared back, accessible aesthetic (no fuss, with preparation, anyone can do this!), and determined very much by whatever is thriving in her rambling home vegetable garden in Malmsbury. As well as being fully illustrated with delightful watercolours by Robin Cowcher – meet the cat ‘Kitten’, meet the geese, meet the dog Tommy – Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchenwill also include photographs that offer another valuable visual dimension to this compelling package.

In addition to seasonal recipes (four menus per season), Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen will present readers with four standout feasts: deep mid-winter; summer solstice; spring bounty; and autumn harvest. Annie’s distinct voice will feature throughout – both guiding readers with advice about getting the best results from her recipes (what went wrong? what about leftovers? why, exactly, is this pastry so good?), and via occasional entertaining vignettes that tell the story of the daily challenges and victories inevitably associated with running a successful small restaurant in a country town – solo.

9. Letters of Love (The Alannah and Madeline Foundation – Various Contributors)

The Port Arthur massacre was one of the darkest days in Australian history. But the response, an unprecedented outpouring of love and compassion, also brought out the best in Australians. One year after that tragedy, Walter Mikac launched the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, in honour of his two young daughters who died alongside their mother on that terrible day. Since then, the Foundation has helped tens of thousands of vulnerable youth feel safe and secure from violence.

On its 20th anniversary, the Alannah and Madeline Foundation will publish Letters of Love, aimed at sending love back into the community again. More than 60 celebrities and public figures have written letters about love in all its shapes and sizes – from romance and plutonic love, to familial love, devotion to nature, and as a celebration of positivity.

The book begins with a letter 6-year-old Alannah wrote to Walter weeks before the tragedy, and ends with a letter Walter has written to his daughter from a new relationship. It’s a beautiful book that harnesses the best in all of us, and is once more testament to the power of the human spirit.

10. First, We Make The Beast Beautiful (Sarah Wilson)

This journey is what I do now. I bump along, in fits and starts, on a perpetual path to finding better ways for me and my mate, Anxiety, to get around. It’s everything I do.

Sarah Wilson – bestselling author and entrepreneur, intrepid solver of problems and investigator of how to live a better life – has helped over 1.2 million people across the world to quit sugar. She has also been an anxiety sufferer her whole life.

In her new book, she directs her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto this lifetime companion of hers, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism her own experiences.

Sarah pulls at the thread of accepted definitions of anxiety, and unravels the notion that it is a difficult, dangerous disease that must be medicated into submission. Ultimately, she re-frames anxiety as a spiritual quest rather than a burdensome affliction, a state of yearning that will lead us closer to what really matters.

Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world’s most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life.

11. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (Giulia Enders)

12. Girl Stuff: 8-12 (Kaz Cooke)

13. Option B (Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant)

14. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (J D Vance)

17. 10 Things Girls Need (Steve Biddulph)

18. A Shepherd’s Life (James Rebanks)

19. Fight Like a Girl (Clementine Ford)

1. The Dry (Jane Harper)

***WINNER OF THE 2017 INDIE AWARDS FOR BOOK OF THE YEAR AND BEST DEBUT FICTION ***

Who really killed the Hadler family?

Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well …

When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.

And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds are reopened. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret … A secret Falk thought long-buried … A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface …

***Jane’s second book, Force of Nature, is due for release in October…and she’s coming to visit us!! Tuesday 17 October 7pm, Tickets $50 – bookings essential. Full details here.***

2. Into The Water (Paula Hawkins)

In the last days before her death, Nel called her sister. Jules didn’t pick up the phone, ignoring her plea for help.

Now Nel is dead. They say she jumped. And Jules has been dragged back to the one place she hoped she had escaped for good, to care for the teenage girl her sister left behind.

But Jules is afraid. So afraid. Of her long-buried memories, of the old Mill House, of knowing that Nel would never have jumped.

And most of all she’s afraid of the water, and the place they call the Drowning Pool…

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, satisfying read that hinges on the stories we tell about our pasts and their power to destroy the lives we live now.

3. The Group (Mary McCarthy)

First published in 1963, The Group follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, forge careers, gossip and party in 1930s Manhattan.

Touted as the original Sex in the City, the novel frankly portrays women’s real lives, exploring subjects such as sex, contraception, motherhood and marriage.

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to fall in love again. Meanwhile, April is struggling through her own directionless life; Lawrence’s reckless past decisions are catching up with him; and Ester and April’s mother, Hilary, is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with the evocative and powerful prose Blain is known for, Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art. Ultimately, it is a joyous tribute to the beauty of being alive.

5. I Am Pilgrim (Terry Hayes)

Pilgrim was the codename for a world class and legendary secret agent.

The adopted son of a wealthy New York family, he was once head of a secret internal affairs force for US intelligence and held the title ‘Rider of the Blue’. He wrote the definitive book on forensic investigation before disappearing into an anonymous retirement, taking the secrets of the Rider of the Blue with him.

A murder in New York: the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features have been ripped from her face, her teeth are missing, her fingerprints gone. The rooms has been sprayed with DNA-eradictaing spray. Someone has seemingly committed the perfect crime using the techniques outlined in Pilgrim’s book.

A terrorist, known only as The Arab, was radicalised when, as a young boy, he witnessed the beheading of his father in a public square in Saudi Arabia. He has dedicated his life to destroying the special relationship between the Kingdom and the United States. He learnt his trade fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and now from hiding in Germany plots a terrible act of mass murder.

When NYPD detective Ben Bradley tracks down Pilgrim, neither man can imagine the terrifying journey they are about to begin, as what begins as an unusual and challenging murder investigation leads them into a direct collision course with the dark forces of jihadist terrorism.

6. The Good People (Hannah Kent)

The fires on the hills smouldered orange as the women left, pockets charged with ashes to guard them from the night. Watching them fade into the grey fall of snow, Nance thought she could hear Maggie’s voice. A whisper in the dark.

“Some folk are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with a skin a little thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.”

Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of her four-year-old grandson, Micheál. The boy cannot walk, or speak, and Nora, mistrustful of the tongues of gossips, has kept the child hidden from those who might see in his deformity evidence of otherworldly interference.

Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a fourteen-year-old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow’s house.

Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person in the valley who might be able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that old Nance Roche has the knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they have taken…

7. The Museum of Modern Love (Heather Rose)

***WINNER OF THE 2017 STELLA PRIZE***

She watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live?

If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do.

Arky Levin is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has asked him to keep one devastating promise. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.

This dazzlingly original novel asks beguiling questions about the nature of art, life and love and finds a way to answer them.

8. Thirst (Jo Nesbo)

In this electrifying new thriller from the author of Police and The Snowman, Inspector Harry Hole hunts down a serial murderer who targets his victims . . . on Tinder.

The murder victim, a self-declared Tinder addict. The one solid clue—fragments of rust and paint in her wounds—leaves the investigating team baffled. Two days later, there’s a second murder: a woman of the same age, a Tinder user, an eerily similar scene. The chief of police knows there’s only one man for this case. But Harry Hole is no longer with the force. He promised the woman he loves, and he promised himself, that he’d never go back: not after his last case, which put the people closest to him in grave danger.

But there’s something about these murders that catches his attention, something in the details that the investigators have missed. For Harry, it’s like hearing “the voice of a man he was trying not to remember.” Now, despite his promises, despite everything he risks, Harry throws himself back into the hunt for a figure who haunts him, the monster who got away.

9. Anything is Possible (Elizabeth Strout)

Years ago, Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer, spent time in hospital, with her mother at the foot of her bed to keep her company. Avoiding the distance between them, they spoke at length about people from their home town, the rural, dusty town of Amgash, Illinois. Writing these stories, Lucy imagines the lives of the people that she especially remembers. And the people she has imagined that, in small ways, have remembered her too.

For isn’t it true that we all hope to be remembered? Or to think in some way – even fleetingly – that we have been important to someone?

A novel in stories by the No. 1 New York Times bestselling and Man Booker long-listed author of My Name is Lucy Barton.

10. Assassin’s Fate (Fitz and the Fool 3#) (Robin Hobb)

The much-anticipated final conclusion to the Fitz and the Fool trilogy.

Prince FitzChivalry Farseer’s daughter Bee was violently abducted from Withywoods by Servants of the Four in their search for the Unexpected Son, foretold to wield great power. With Fitz in pursuit, the Servants fled through a Skill-pillar, leaving no trace. It seems certain that they and their young hostage have perished in the Skill-river.

Clerres, where White Prophets were trained by the Servants to set the world on a better path, has been corrupted by greed. Fitz is determined to reach the city and take vengeance on the Four, not only for the loss of Bee but also for their torture of the Fool. Accompanied by FitzVigilant, son of the assassin Chade, Chade’s protégé Spark and the stableboy Perseverance, Bee’s only friend, their journey will take them from the Elderling city of Kelsingra, down the perilous Rain Wild River, and on to the Pirate Isles.

Their mission for revenge will become a voyage of discovery, as well as of reunions, transformations and heartrending shocks. Startling answers to old mysteries are revealed. What became of the liveships Paragon and Vivacia and their crews? What is the origin of the Others and their eerie beach? How are liveships and dragons connected?

But Fitz and his followers are not the only ones with a deadly grudge against the Four. An ancient wrong will bring them unlikely and dangerous allies in their quest. And if the corrupt society of Clerres is to be brought down, Fitz and the Fool will have to make a series of profound and fateful sacrifices.

Assassin’s Fate is a magnificent tour de force and with it Robin Hobb demonstrates yet again that she is the reigning queen of epic fantasy.

17. The Stars Are Fire (Anita Shreve)

18. The Last Paining of Sara De Vos (Dominic Smith)

19. Exit West (Mohsin Hamid)

20. Fix (David Baldacci)

FICTION

The Stars Are Fire (Anita Shreve)

1947. After a summer-long drought, fires are racing along the coast of Maine, ravaging two hundred thousand acres – the largest fire in the state’s history.

Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband Gene joins the volunteers fighting to bring the fire under control. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie’s two young children, the women watch in horror as their houses go up in flames, then walk into the ocean as a last resort. They spend the night frantically trying to save their children. When dawn comes, they have miraculously survived, but their lives are forever changed: homeless, penniless, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists.

As Grace awaits news of her husband’s fate, she is thrust into a new world in which she must make a life on her own, beginning with absolutely nothing – she must find work, a home, a way to provide for her children. In the midst of devastating loss, Grace discovers glorious new freedoms – joys and triumphs she could never have expected her narrow life with Gene could contain – and her spirit soars. And then the unthinkable happens, and Grace’s bravery is tested as never before.

The Lucky One (Caroline Overington)

An old castle …
For more than 150 years, a grand house known as Alden Castle has stood proudly in the rolling hills of California’s wine country, home to a family weighed down by secrets and debt.

A fresh body …
When the castle is sold, billionaire developers move in, only to discover one skeleton after another – including a fresh corpse – rotting in the old family cemetery.

An unsolved mystery …
As three generations of the well-respected Alden-Stowe family come under scrutiny, police unearth a twisted web of rivalries, alliances, deceit, and treachery.

A gold-digger wife, a demented patriarch, a daughter in the grip of first love … Who has lied? Who will survive? And who, amidst all the horror and betrayal, is the lucky one?

Based On A True Story (Delphine De Vigan)

Today I know that L. is the sole reason for my powerlessness. And that the two years that we were friends almost made me stop writing for ever.

Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and unable to begin writing her next book, Delphine meets L.

L. is the kind of impeccable, sophisticated woman who fascinates Delphine; a woman with smooth hair and perfectly filed nails, and a gift for saying the right thing. Delphine finds herself irresistibly drawn to her, their friendship growing as their meetings, notes and texts increase. But as L. begins to dress like Delphine, and, in the face of Delphine’s crippling inability to write, L. even offers to answer her emails, and their relationship rapidly intensifies. L. becomes more and more involved in Delphine’s life until she patiently takes control and turns it upside down: slowly, surely, insidiously.

Based on a True Story is a chilling novel of suspense that will leave you questioning the truth and its significance long after you have turned the final page.

House Of Names (Colm Toibin)

I HAVE BEEN ACQUAINTED WITH THE SMELL OF DEATH.

Judged, despised, cursed by gods she has long since lost faith in, the murderess Clytemnestra tells of the deception of Agamemnon, how he sacrificed her eldest daughter – her beloved Iphigenia – to the Trojan campaign; how Clytemnestra used what power she had, seducing the prisoner Aegisthus, turning the government against its lord; plotting the many long years until her beacon fires announce the king’s return …

Electra, daughter of a murdered father, loyal subject of the rightful king, studies Clytemnestra and her lover with cold anger and slow-burning cunning. She watches as they walk the gardens and corridors of the palace. She waits for the traitors to become complacent, to believe they are finally safe; she waits for her exiled brother, Orestes, for the boy to become a warrior, for fate to follow him home. She watches and she waits, until her spies announce her brother’s return …

Closing Down (Sally Abbott)

What would you do if all you held to be familiar was lost?

Australia’s rural towns and communities are closing down, much of Australia is being sold to overseas interests, states and countries and regions are being realigned worldwide.

Town matriarch Granna Adams, her grandson Roberto, the lonely and thoughtful Clare – all try in their own way to hold on to their sense of self, even as the world around them fractures.

The past is long gone. The question now is: do they have a future?

Assassin’s Fate (Fitz and the Fool 3#) (Robin Hobb)

The much-anticipated final conclusion to the Fitz and the Fool trilogy.

Prince FitzChivalry Farseer’s daughter Bee was violently abducted from Withywoods by Servants of the Four in their search for the Unexpected Son, foretold to wield great power. With Fitz in pursuit, the Servants fled through a Skill-pillar, leaving no trace. It seems certain that they and their young hostage have perished in the Skill-river.

Clerres, where White Prophets were trained by the Servants to set the world on a better path, has been corrupted by greed. Fitz is determined to reach the city and take vengeance on the Four, not only for the loss of Bee but also for their torture of the Fool. Accompanied by FitzVigilant, son of the assassin Chade, Chade’s protégé Spark and the stableboy Perseverance, Bee’s only friend, their journey will take them from the Elderling city of Kelsingra, down the perilous Rain Wild River, and on to the Pirate Isles.

Their mission for revenge will become a voyage of discovery, as well as of reunions, transformations and heartrending shocks. Startling answers to old mysteries are revealed. What became of the liveships Paragon and Vivacia and their crews? What is the origin of the Others and their eerie beach? How are liveships and dragons connected?

But Fitz and his followers are not the only ones with a deadly grudge against the Four. An ancient wrong will bring them unlikely and dangerous allies in their quest. And if the corrupt society of Clerres is to be brought down, Fitz and the Fool will have to make a series of profound and fateful sacrifices.

Assassin’s Fate is a magnificent tour de force and with it Robin Hobb demonstrates yet again that she is the reigning queen of epic fantasy.

Earthly Remains (Donna Leon)

During the interrogation of an entitled, arrogant man suspected of giving drugs to a young girl who then died, Commissario Guido Brunetti acts rashly, doing something he will quickly come to regret. In the aftermath, he begins to doubt his career choices and realises that he needs a break from the stifling problems of his work.

Granted leave from the Questura, Brunetti is shipped off by his wife, Paola, to a villa owned by a wealthy relative on Sant’Erasmo, one of the largest islands in the Venetian laguna. There, he intends to pass his days rowing, and his nights reading Pliny’s Natural History.

The recuperative stay goes according to plan and Brunetti is finally able to relax, until Davide Casati, the caretaker of the house, goes missing following a sudden storm. Nobody can find him – not his daughter, not his friends, and not the woman he’d been secretly visiting. Now, Brunetti feels compelled to investigate, to set aside his holiday and discover what happened to the man who had recently become his friend.

In Earthly Remains, Donna Leon shows Venice through an insider’s eyes. From family meals and vaporetti rides to the never-ending influx of tourists and suffocating political corruption, the details and rhythms of everyday Venetian life are at the core of this thrilling novel, and of the terrible crime at its heart.

The Boy On The Bridge (M.R. Carey)

Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy.The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world.To where the monsters lived.

In The Boy On The Bridge, M. R. Carey returns to the world of The Girl With All The Gifts, the phenomenal word-of-mouth bestseller which is now a critically acclaimed film starring Sennia Nanua, Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine.

NON-FICTION

China Baby Love (Jane Hutcheon)

In 1997 Linda McCarthy Shum had a stable teaching career and a happy marriage with beloved partner Greg. Living in regional Queensland, Linda was a woman of deep faith with a family of grown children and grand-children on the way. She was 49 and her life was fine.

But Linda’s life had not always been so settled. Throughout her childhood she had been made to feel unwanted by a mother battling her own troubles. This cold beginning to Linda’s life journey, and the sad cruelty she had just read about in a newsletter, would soon bring her life undone.

The article spoke of Chinese babies being abandoned and dying because of a lack of human contact. The unwanted children were seen as ‘throwaway kids’ and armies of them were filling up the orphanages of China.

Linda Shum was appalled. A year later, on her first-ever trip overseas, she visited an orphanage filled with sick and dying children, the hidden human aftermath of China’s One-Child Policy.

For almost two decades, while China busily developed into a wealthy economy, Linda has travelled back and forth from her home, raising money to better care for the orphans. Battling distrusting government officials and a constant lack of funds, Linda has saved countless little lives, while also establishing a school in the orphanage and a foster-care program.

Today she is the founder and President of the Chinese Orphans Assistance Team (COAT). Linda’s work has given the ‘throwaway kids’ a brighter future, but her achievements have been hard won. During her twenty-year sojourn against sorrow, Linda has had to overcome her own tragedies, surviving breast cancer and a double mastectomy and later the loss of her husband Greg.

Host of ABC-TV’s One Plus One, and former China correspondent, Jane Hutcheon was captivated by Linda Shum’s story and driven to write a compelling account of a passionate and complex woman who has journeyed into the abandoned heart of the world’s most populous nation.

Ferment For Good (Sharon Flynn)

The ancient art of fermenting is finding new popularity again as modern science and trends discover the importance of gut health for overall wellbeing.

Ferment for Good is a guide to discovering the joys of fermentation in its myriad variations – framed through the eyes of Sharon Flynn, a one-time English teacher who has hooked early in her 20s and has since made it her life’s work to learn and share all there is to know about this most ancient of practices.

Her mission with her business is for the person who buys her products to feel as if they are receiving it from an old friend – one who desperately wants to share her discovery and passion with them. So too with the book. Alongside a how-to guide to the basics (why do it; what you need; and what you’ll get), the book offers sections on wild fermented vegetables (including sauerkraut, kimchi and brine ferments); drinks (water kefir, kombucha, Jun tea, pineapple wine, mead); milk and dairy (including yoghurt and milk kefir), condiments and breads (such as mustard, spreads, dosa and injera); and Japanese ferments (including miso & tamari, soy sauce, sake kasu and pickled ginger).

Sharon Flynn shares her knowledge of and passion for fermentation in her accessible, chatty style, combining personal anectdotes of her fermenting adventures with hands-on instructions on how to set up your own benchtop fermentary at home. She completes the package by sharing her favourite recipes and ideas for incorporating ferments into your everyday life and meals.

Lovingly illustrated and featuring informative photos,Ferment for Good is a beautiful, carefully curated collection to introduce you to the world of fermentation.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Richard Ford)

Richard Ford’s parents volunteered little about their early lives – and he rarely asked. Later, he pieced their stories together from anecdote, history and the occasional photograph, frozen moments linking him to another time.

Edna Akin, a dark-eyed Arkansas beauty whose convent education was cut short by her itinerant parents, fell in love aged only seventeen. Parker Ford was a tall country boy with a warm, hesitant smile, who was working at a grocery in Hot Springs. They married and began a life on the road in the American South, as Parker followed his travelling salesman’s job. The 1930s were like one long weekend, a swirl of miles traversed, cocktails drunk and hotel rooms vacated: New Orleans, Memphis, Texarkana. Then a single, late child was born, changing everything.

In this book, Richard Ford evokes a vivid panorama of mid-twentieth century America, and an intimate portrait of family life. Exploring children’s changing perception of their parents, he also reflects on the impact of loss and devotion. Written with the intelligence, precision and humanity for which Ford is renowned, Between Them is both a son’s great act of love and a redeeming meditation on family.

Depends What You Mean By Extremist (John Safran)

No one turns up where they’re not wanted quite like John Safran. In this hilarious and disorienting adventure he gets among our diverse community of white nationalists, ISIS supporters, anarchists and more, digging away at the contradictions that many would prefer be left unexamined. Who is this black puppet-master among the white nationalists? And this Muslim fundamentalist who geeks out on Monty Python? Is there a secret radicalisation network operating in John’s own Jewish suburb? And ultimately – is hanging with all these radicals washing off on John himself?

Populated by an extraordinary cast of ‘ordinary’ Australians, Depends What You Mean by Extremist is a startling, confronting portrait of contemporary Australia. We all think we know what’s going on in our own country, but this larger-than-life, timely, and alarmingly insightful true story will make you think again . . .

PICTURE STORY

Olivia The Spy (Ian Falconer)

Everyone’s favorite pig is about to have a birthday…but will her penchant for eavesdropping lead to more than presents?

Olivia’s birthday is days away. Plans must be made. Who makes plans? Moms! Who simply must know the plans? Olivia, who is NOT above eavesdropping. But when she not-so-accidentally-but-kinda overhears her mom talking about her not-so-squeaky-clean-and-possibly-very-bad-behavior, Olivia’s imagination runs wild…because it sounds like not only will there be no birthday, but Mom might just be sending her to military school instead. What a BAD birthday that would be!

We’re All Wonders (R.J.Palacio)

I know I can’t change the way I look. But maybe, just maybe, people can change the way they see . . .

Wonder is the unforgettable story of August Pullman, an ordinary boy with an extraordinary face. With over 5 million copies sold, Wonder is a true modern classic, a life-changing read, and has inspired kindness and acceptance in countless readers.

Now younger readers can discover the Wonder message with this gorgeous picture book, starring Auggie and his dog Daisy on an original adventure, written and illustrated by R.J. Palacio. With spare, powerful text and richly-imagined illustrations, We’re All Wonders shows readers what it’s like to live in Auggie’s world – a world in which he feels like any other kid, but he’s not always seen that way.

We’re All Wonders taps into every child’s longing to belong, and to be seen for who they truly are. It’s the perfect way for families and teachers to talk about empathy, difference and kindness with young children.

Stack The Cats (Susie Ghahremani)

One cat sleeps. Two cats play. Three cats stack!

Stack the Cats is a charming book about counting and organizing cats in various formations. But when the cats decide to go their own way as cats often will it’s time to count down until there’s only one sweet cat left. Counting forward and backward, understanding when there are more or fewer of something, and grouping and recognizing the number of items in a group are key early-math skills for toddlers, making Stack the Cats as developmentally sound as it is ridiculously adorable.

JUNIOR FICTION

The Boy And The Spy (Felice Arena)

Life has never been easy for Antonio, but since the war began there are German soldiers on every corner, fearsome gangsters and the fascist police everywhere, and no one ever has enough to eat. But when Antonio decides to trust a man who has literally fallen from the sky, he leaps into an adventure that will change his life and maybe even the future of Sicily…

A Different Dog (Paul Jennings)

The forest is dense and dark. And the trail full of unexpected perils. The dog can’t move. The boy can’t talk. And you won’t know why. Or where you are going. You will put this story down not wanting the journey to end.

But it’s from Paul Jennings so watch out for the ambush.

One of the best. From one of the best.

Fully Doomed (The Turner’s #3) (Mick Elliott)

Leo Lennox is in big trouble.

Actually, every Turner on the planet is in big trouble: a deranged scientist is threatening to expose their secret world and destroy them all.

With help from a pair of guerrilla gorillas (and their incredible inventions), his nerdy friend Ernie, and his annoying-but-sort-of-all-right older sister Abbie, Leo must criss-cross the world to stop the mad doctor before he serves up the full buffet of doom to Turners everywhere.

If he can’t, the planet won’t be just a little bit doomed – it’ll be fully doomed!

The riotous and fast-paced conclusion to the bestselling TURNERS trilogy.

Blink And You Die (Ruby Redfort #6) (Lauren Child)

Say goodbye to Ruby Redfort: every smart kid’s smart kid. The mind-blowing conclusion to the thrilling series by award-winning author Lauren Child. Ruby Redfort: undercover agent, code-cracker and thirteen-year-old genius – you can count on her when the ice starts to crack.

All good things come to an end… Ruby Redfort is running scared, a whole bunch of people want her dead and worst of all one of them is on her team. But just who is this agent of doom?

You can run, Ruby, but you can’t hide…

YOUNG ADULT

A Court of Wings and Ruin (Sarah J. Maas)

Feyre has returned to the Spring Court, determined to gather information on Tamlin’s maneuverings and the invading king threatening to bring Prythian to its knees. But to do so she must play a deadly game of deceit-and one slip may spell doom not only for Feyre, but for her world as well.

As war bears down upon them all, Feyre must decide who to trust amongst the dazzling and lethal High Lords-and hunt for allies in unexpected places.

In this thrilling third book in the #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling series from Sarah J. Maas, the earth will be painted red as mighty armies grapple for power over the one thing that could destroy them all.

Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology (Edited by Danielle Binks)

The YA event of the year.

Bestsellers. Award-winners. Superstars.

This anthology has them all.

With brilliantly entertaining short stories from beloved young adult authors Amie Kaufman, Melissa Keil, Will Kostakis, Ellie Marney, Jaclyn Moriarty, Michael Pryor, Alice Pung, Gabrielle Tozer, Lili Wilkinson and Danielle Binks, this all-new collection will show the world exactly how much there is to love about Aussie YA.

Release (Patrick Ness)

Today will change Adam Thorn’s life. Between his religious family, unpleasant boss and his ex-boyfriend, the bindings of his world are coming undone. And way across town, a ghost has risen from the lake. Is there time for Adam to find his release?

A startling and tender novel about how to let yourself love and set yourself free by Patrick Ness, the twice Carnegie Medal-winning author of A Monster Calls.

The Dark Prophecy (Trials of Apollo #2) (Rick Riordan)

The god Apollo, cast down to earth and trapped in the form of a gawky teenage boy as punishment, must set off on the second of his harrowing (and hilarious) trials.

He and his companions seek the ancient oracles – restoring them is the only way for Apollo to reclaim his place on Mount Olympus – but this is easier said than done.

Somewhere in the American Midwest is a haunted cave that may hold answers for Apollo in his quest to become a god again . . . if it doesn’t kill him or drive him insane first. Standing in Apollo’s way is the second member of the evil Triumvirate – a Roman emperor whose love of bloodshed and spectacle makes even Nero look tame.

To survive the encounter, Apollo will need the help of a now-mortal goddess, a bronze dragon, and some familiar demigod faces from Camp Half-Blood. With them by his side, can Apollo face down the greatest challenge of his four thousand years of existence?

1. The Barefoot Investor (Scott Pape)

This is the only money guide you’ll ever need.

That’s a bold claim, given there are already thousands of finance books on the shelves.

So what makes this one different?

Well, you won’t be overwhelmed with a bunch of ‘tips’ … or a strict budget (that you won’t follow). You’ll get a step-by-step formula: open this account, then do this; call this person, and say this; invest money here, and not there. All with a glass of wine in your hand.

This book will show you how to create an entire financial plan that is so simple you can sketch it on the back of a serviette … and you’ll be able to manage your money in 10 minutes a week.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

This book is full of stories from everyday Aussies — single people, young families, empty nesters, retirees — who have applied the simple steps in this book and achieved amazing, life-changing results.

And you’re next.

2. Fifteen Young Men (Paul Kennedy)

It was a maritime tragedy that unfolded one sad, dark hour at a time. A cold, cruelly blustery night revealing – with agonising slowness – that fifteen young men of the Mornington Football Club would never make it home. As dawn broke and families began to mourn, a nation was to learn the full extent of one of the world’s worst sporting disasters.

The sinking of the Process in catastrophically rough seas off Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 1892, with the loss of all on board, horrified Australia. ‘Such an accident has no parallel in our land’s history,’ reported The Argus. Yet somehow, for more than a century, this calamitous event slipped from Australia’s consciousness.

In Fifteen Young Men, journalist Paul Kennedy reveals the stories behind the tragedy. In his compelling evocation of a spirited Australian town on the cusp of a new century, he captures the trauma of families and friends suffering almost unbearable loss, but also the irrepressible optimism of the times, and the mateship, love and resilience that would come to define a budding nation.

3. CSIRO Low Carb Diet (Grant Brinkworth)

Based on emerging research from around the world, as well as original CSIRO research recently conducted in Australia, the low-carb diet has proved successful in managing lifestyle-induced metabolic diseases, including unhealthy weight gain and type 2 diabetes. The diet lowers the proportion of carbohydrate relative to protein and unsaturated ‘healthy’ fat, and encourages participants to follow a regular exercise routine.

This easy-to-follow, comprehensive lifestyle plan integrates these principles and can help you not only to reach your weight-loss goals, but also to maximise its benefits for improved metabolic health, blood glucose control and diabetes management.

4. Trigger Warning (Bill Leak)

Bill Leak’s daily cartoons in The Australian newspaper have been variously described as the works of a genius and Australia’s most insightful and thought-provoking arbiter of the main story of the day. Thumbing through Trigger Warning, a collection of Bill’s cartoons from 2016, it’s easy to argue that those terms have not been used loosely.

5. Lion: A Long Way Home (Saroo Brierley)

When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines.

Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five. Not knowing the name of his family or where he was from, he survived for weeks on the streets of Kolkata, before being taken into an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia.

Despite being happy in his new family, Saroo always wondered about his origins. He spent hours staring at the map of India on his bedroom wall. When he was a young man the advent of Google Earth led him to pore over satellite images of the country for landmarks he recognised. And one day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for.

Then he set off on a journey to find his mother.

Lion: A Long Way Home is a moving and inspirational true story that celebrates the importance of never letting go of what drives the human spirit – hope. Now a major motion picture starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara.

6. Unmasked (Turia Pitt)

Whether via the numerous media reports, 60 Minutes specials, Women’s Weekly cover stories or her first book, Everything To Live For, we know about the why, how and what of that fateful day in September 2011. We know how she died four times on the operating table and her tortuous road to recovery. We’ve had a glimpse of the love of her boyfriend, Michael, that sustained her, and seen hints of the inner-strength that has made her one of the most admired women in the country. But until now, the true essence of this most remarkable Australian, plus the toll her accident has all taken on her and those around her, have remained a mystery.

How and why does she push herself to ever greater physical and mental limits? What does she see when she looks in the mirror? How does her sudden celebrity (for the most unorthodox of reasons) sit with her? What lessons has she learned in the past five years? And, crucially, how can each and every one of us take those lessons and apply them to our own lives?

More than a simple chronology of events – and against the backdrop of a never-ending series of impressive physical feats, including climbing the Great Wall of China, walking the Kokoda Track and competing in not one but two Ironman competitions – this book unmasks the real Turia: funny, fierce, intelligent, flawed.

With the benefit of hindsight and five years’ worth of getting of wisdom, Turia is only now able to account for how she prevailed where others might have faltered. And for the first time, in this book we get to know the people who – by Turia’s own admission – made her recovery possible.

Unmasked will reveal the woman behind the headlines, and in so doing, uncover the grace, humour and inner-steel that gets Turia Pitt through every day – and which leaves the rest of us watching on in amazement.

7. Quarterly Essay: The White Queen (David Marr)

Most Australians despise what Pauline Hanson stands for, yet politics in this country is now orbiting around One Nation.

In this timely Quarterly Essay, David Marr looks at Australia’s politics of fear, resentment and race. Who votes One Nation, and why? How much of this is due to inequality? How much to racism? How should the major parties respond to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim voices? What damage do Australia’s new entrepreneurs of hate inflict on the nation?

Written with drama and wit, this is a ground-breaking look at politics and prejudice by one of Australia’s best writers.

“This woman went to prison, danced the cha-cha on national television for a couple of years, and failed so often at the ballot box she became a running joke. But the truth is she never left us. She was always knocking on the door. Most of those defeats at the polls were close-run things. For twenty years political leaders appeased Hanson’s followers while working to keep her out of office. The first strategy tainted Australian politics. The second eventually failed. So she’s with us again – the Kabuki make-up, that mop of red hair and the voice telling us what we already know: ‘I’m fed up.’” —David Marr

8. Mrs Kelly (Grantlee Kieza)

When Ned Kelly’s mother, Ellen, arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. By the time she died aged ninety-one in 1923, having outlived seven of her twelve children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern, sovereign nation.

Like so many pioneering women, Ellen, the wife of a convict, led a life of great hardship. Born in Ireland during a time of entrenched poverty and sectarian violence, she was a mother of seven when her husband died after months in a police lock-up. She lived through famine and drought, watched her babies die, listened through the prison wall while her eldest son was hanged and saw the charred remains of another of her children who’d died in a shoot-out with police. One son became Australia’s most infamous (and ultimately most celebrated) outlaw; another became a highly decorated policeman, an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a worldwide star on the rodeo circuit. Through it all, ‘the notorious Mrs Kelly’, as she was dubbed by Victoria’s Assistant Police Commissioner, survived as best she could, like so many pioneering women of the time.

By bestselling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia’s most notorious women and her wild family, but it’s also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

9. Beyond The Rock (Janelle Mcculoch)

In the winter of 1966, at sixty-nine years of age, Lady Joan Lindsay sat down and wrote a short novel about a group of upper-class schoolgirls from a prestigious ladies’ college who disappear while on a country picnic in the summer of 1900. The result was Picnic at Hanging Rock, a literary mystery that has endured for half a century.

Beyond the Rock looks at not just the myth of Picnic and how it has become part of Australia’s culture, but also the story behind it. It examines Joan Lindsay’s enigmatic life, much of which she kept secret from the world, including her childhood, her complex marriage to Daryl Lindsay of the famous Lindsay family of artists, their enduring love and unconventional bohemian life, and her life at Mulberry Hill, the Lindsays’ own Arcadia deep in the Victorian countryside.

This is the story of one of Australia’s most famous novels, and the author who kept its secrets until she died.

10. The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller (Carol Baxter)

Petite, glamorous and beguiling, Jessie ‘Chubbie’ Miller was one remarkable woman … flyer, thrill seeker, heartbreaker. No adventure was too wild for her, no danger too extreme. And all over the world men adored her.

When the young Jessie left suburban Melbourne and her newspaperman husband in 1927, little did she know that she’d become the first woman to complete an England to Australia flight (with a black silk gown thrown into her small flight bag, just in case), or fly the first air race for women with Amelia Earhart, or that she would disappear over the Florida Straits feared lost forever only to charm her way to a rescue. Nor could she have predicted that five years later she’d find herself at the centre of one of the most notorious and controversial murder trials in United States history. And this all began with something as ridiculously mundane as a pat of butter.

The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller is a spellbinding story of an extraordinary woman – an international celebrity during the golden age of aviation – and her passionate and spirited life.

11. Fight Like A Girl (Clementine Ford)

A friend recently told me that the things I write are powerful for her because they have the effect of making her feel angry instead of just empty. I want to do this for all women and young girls – to take the emptiness and numbness they feel about being a girl in this world and turn it into rage and power. I want to teach all of them how to FIGHT LIKE A GIRL.

Online sensation, fearless feminist heroine and scourge of trolls and misogynists everywhere, Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to thousands of Australian women and girls. Her incendiary debut Fight Like A Girl is an essential manifesto for feminists new, old and soon-to-be, and exposes just how unequal the world continues to be for women. Crucially, it is a call to arms for all women to rediscover the fury that has been suppressed by a society that still considers feminism a threat.

Fight Like A Girl will make you laugh, cry and scream. But above all it will make you demand and fight for a world in which women have real equality and not merely the illusion of it.

12. Dark Emu (Bruce Pascoe)

Dark Emu puts forward an argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer tag for precolonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing – behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie.

Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

13. Insomniac City (Bill Hayes)

Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance–“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life,” he tells Hayes early on–is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes’s distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

14. After (Nikki Gemmell)

Australia’s bravest and most honest writer explores the devastating aftermath of her elderly mother’s decision to end her own life.

Nikki Gemmell’s world changed forever in October 2015 when the body of her elderly mother was found and it became clear she had decided to end her own life. After the immediate shock and devastation came the guilt and the horror, for Nikki, her family, relatives and friends. No note was left, so the questions that Elayn’s death raised were endless. Was the decision an act of independence or the very opposite? Was it a desperate act driven by hopelessness and anger, or was her euthanasia a reasoned act of empowerment?

After is the story of Elayn Gemmell – and the often difficult, prickly relationship between mothers and daughters, and how that changes over time. As anguished as it truthful, as powerful as it is profound, After is about life, death, elderly parents, mothers and daughters, hurt and healing, and about how little, sometimes, we know the ones we love the most.

A deeply intimate, fiercely beautiful, blazingly bold and important book.

15. Everywhere I Look (Helen Garner)

I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there’s a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring.

Helen Garner is one of Australia’s greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice.

Everywhere I Look includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life.

16. Eight Week Blood Sugar Diet (Michael Mosley)

Everywhere we look in the world today, we are encouraged to treat ourselves to foods and drinks that are damaging our bodies. Eating low-quality carbohydrates produces a constant overload of sugar in our blood stream that furs up the arteries and piles fat into our internal organs. The result has been a doubling in the number of type-2 diabetics over the last few decades, as well as a surge in those with the potentially hazardous condition, pre-diabetes.

It is now known that even moderately elevated blood sugar levels can trigger a range of life-threatening diseases, including cancer, heart disease and dementia. Scientists in the UK have recently made a revolutionary discovery. They have not only identified an important cause of type-2 diabetes but have demonstrated in medical trials that you can prevent and even reverse the condition.

In this book Dr Michael Mosley, the medical journalist who alerted the world to the benefits of intermittent fasting draws on the work of Professor Roy Taylor – one of the UK’s foremost diabetes experts – to present a radical new solution to ‘diabesity’. He explains the science of how and why rapid weight loss combats blood sugar problems, and offers a clear, precise plan – complete with delicious, healthy recipes and menu plans – to enable you to regain your health and then stay on track – medication free. As Dr Mosley says, it is never too late to act…

17. Basics To Brilliance (Donna Hay)

Donna believes that, just like anything you want to be good at, mastering the basics is how you build confidence. So, in this book, she’s sharing all her favourite, tried and true recipes – think the perfect tender steak, golden roast chicken, crispy pork belly, her nan’s sponge cake, and of course the fudgiest brownies! Each basic recipe is followed by clever variations and simple flavour change-ups, so one recipe becomes many and your repertoire naturally grows. Take Donna’s ‘no-fail meringue mixture’ – once mastered, this basic recipe can be tweaked to be turned into the perfect pavlova; divinely flavoured salted caramel, chocolate, rosewater and pistachio, and raspberry meringues for an elegant afternoon tea; or a silky smooth and tangy lemon meringue pie for a divine dessert for a dinner party.

This is your ultimate guide to being brilliant in the kitchen!

18. Kitchen Garden Companion (Stephanie Alexander)

This is the ultimate garden-to-table guide from one of Australia’s most highly regarded food writers.

Authoritative and distinctly personal, the book offers detailed garden and kitchen notes for 73 vegetables, herbs and fruits, along with 250 delicious recipes. Just as The Cook’s Companion inspired a generation to rediscover the pleasures of the kitchen, Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion will revolutionise the way we think about sourcing, growing and sharing our food.

19. Full Bore (William McInnnes)

A chance encounter in an auction house is the jumping-off point for William’s inimitable take on our sport-obsessed nation, Australian popular culture and the artefacts and memorabilia that both make us cringe with recognition and laugh with warm affection. His trademark humour and anecdotes litter this collection, making it a true delight.

These are truly Aussie stories: about us, and about the things – and the people – in our lives.

William McInnes, one of Australia’s best-loved entertainers and authors, takes a look at the Aussie obsession with sports and pop culture.

20. Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen (Annie Smithers)

Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen is a window on the bucolic world of acclaimed Victorian chef Annie Smithers. A handsome, gifty package, it includes a best-of selection of three and four-course menus collected by Annie over the three years of her restaurant, du Fermier, in Trentham. While part of du Fermier’s appeal is undeniably its charming central Victorian location, this farmhouse-style eatery is the sort of place intrepid food lovers might equally stumble across in rural France or Dorset or California.

Annie’s food is classic French Provincial, presented with a distinct pared back, accessible aesthetic (no fuss, with preparation, anyone can do this!), and determined very much by whatever is thriving in her rambling home vegetable garden in Malmsbury. As well as being fully illustrated with delightful watercolours by Robin Cowcher – meet the cat ‘Kitten’, meet the geese, meet the dog Tommy – Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchenwill also include photographs that offer another valuable visual dimension to this compelling package.

In addition to seasonal recipes (four menus per season), Annie’s Farmhouse Kitchen will present readers with four standout feasts: deep mid-winter; summer solstice; spring bounty; and autumn harvest. Annie’s distinct voice will feature throughout – both guiding readers with advice about getting the best results from her recipes (what went wrong? what about leftovers? why, exactly, is this pastry so good?), and via occasional entertaining vignettes that tell the story of the daily challenges and victories inevitably associated with running a successful small restaurant in a country town – solo.

1. The Dry (Jane Harper)

***WINNER OF THE 2017 INDIE AWARDS FOR BOOK OF THE YEAR AND BEST DEBUT FICTION ***

Who really killed the Hadler family?

Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well …

When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.

And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds are reopened. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret … A secret Falk thought long-buried … A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface …

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to fall in love again. Meanwhile, April is struggling through her own directionless life; Lawrence’s reckless past decisions are catching up with him; and Ester and April’s mother, Hilary, is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with the evocative and powerful prose Blain is known for, Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art. Ultimately, it is a joyous tribute to the beauty of being alive.

3. To Know My Crime (Fiona Capp)

Having lost all his family’s money in ill-advised investments during the GFC, Ned is reduced to squatting in a boatshed in wealthy Portsea. He is avoiding the world, particularly his sister, Angela, who after an accident, is now a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair, and completely dependent on both her carer, Mai, and Ned – not to mention the income from their family investments.

But one day, Ned overhears a conversation between a millionaire property developer and a politician, and realizes that this might be his opportunity to restore their fortunes … if he has the nerve.

A nail-biting and compelling story of risk, blackmail and the corrosive nature of guilt – and how we all have to live with the consequences of our actions.

4. The Good People (Hannah Kent)

The fires on the hills smouldered orange as the women left, pockets charged with ashes to guard them from the night. Watching them fade into the grey fall of snow, Nance thought she could hear Maggie’s voice. A whisper in the dark.

“Some folk are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with a skin a little thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.”

Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of her four-year-old grandson, Micheál. The boy cannot walk, or speak, and Nora, mistrustful of the tongues of gossips, has kept the child hidden from those who might see in his deformity evidence of otherworldly interference.

Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a fourteen-year-old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow’s house.

Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person in the valley who might be able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that old Nance Roche has the knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they have taken…

5. Thirst (Jo Nesbo)

In this electrifying new thriller from the author of Police and The Snowman, Inspector Harry Hole hunts down a serial murderer who targets his victims . . . on Tinder.

The murder victim, a self-declared Tinder addict. The one solid clue—fragments of rust and paint in her wounds—leaves the investigating team baffled. Two days later, there’s a second murder: a woman of the same age, a Tinder user, an eerily similar scene. The chief of police knows there’s only one man for this case. But Harry Hole is no longer with the force. He promised the woman he loves, and he promised himself, that he’d never go back: not after his last case, which put the people closest to him in grave danger.

But there’s something about these murders that catches his attention, something in the details that the investigators have missed. For Harry, it’s like hearing “the voice of a man he was trying not to remember.” Now, despite his promises, despite everything he risks, Harry throws himself back into the hunt for a figure who haunts him, the monster who got away.

6. Truly Madly Guilty (Lianne Moriarty)

Clementine is haunted by regret. It was just a barbeque. They didn’t even know their hosts that well, they were friends of friends. They could so easily have said no.

But she and her husband Sam said yes, and now they can never change what they did and didn’t do that Sunday afternoon.

Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One playful dog. It’s an ordinary weekend in the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong?

Marriage, sex, parenthood and friendship: Liane Moriarty takes these elements of our lives and shows us how guilt can expose the fault lines in any relationship, and it is not until we appreciate the fragility of life that we can truly value what we have.

7. See What I have Done (Sarah Schmidt)

On 4 August 1892 Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. During the inquest into the deaths, Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged with the murder of her father and her stepmother.

Through the eyes of Lizzie’s sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, the enigmatic stranger Benjamin and the beguiling Lizzie herself, we return to what happened that day in Fall River.

Lizzie Borden took an axe. Or did she?

A deeply atmospheric novel by a startling new Aussie talent; an incredibly unique look inside the mind of Lizzie Borden, famously accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892.

8. Big Little Lies (Lianne Moriarty)

The internationally bestselling author turns her unique gaze on the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves every day and what really goes on behind closed suburban doors.

‘I guess it started with the mothers.’‘It was all just a terrible misunderstanding.’‘I’ll tell you exactly why it happened.’

Pirriwee Public’s annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. A parent is dead. Was it murder, a tragic accident… or something else entirely?

Big Little Lies is a funny, heartbreaking, challenging story of ex-husbands and second wives, new friendships, old betrayals and and schoolyard politics.

‘Let me be clear. This is not a circus. This is a murder investigation.’

9. The Last Painting Of Sara De Vos (Dominic Smith)

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain-a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the Manhattan bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she’s curating an exhibition of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.

As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.

In this extraordinary novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Australian writer Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

10. The Restorer (Michael Sala)

After a year apart, Maryanne returns to her husband, Roy, bringing their eight-year-old son Daniel and his teenage sister Freya with her. The family move from Sydney to Newcastle, where Roy has bought a derelict house on the coast. As Roy painstakingly patches the holes in the floorboards and plasters over cracks in the walls, Maryanne believes, for a while, that they can rebuild a life together.

But Freya doesn’t want a fresh start—she just wants out—and Daniel drifts around the sprawling, run-down house in a dream, infuriating his father, who soon forgets the promises he has made.

Some cracks can never be smoothed over, and tension grows between Roy and Maryanne until their uneasy peace is ruptured—with devastating consequences.

11. I Am Pilgrim (Terry Hayes)

Pilgrim was the codename for a world class and legendary secret agent.

The adopted son of a wealthy New York family, he was once head of a secret internal affairs force for US intelligence and held the title ‘Rider of the Blue’. He wrote the definitive book on forensic investigation before disappearing into an anonymous retirement, taking the secrets of the Rider of the Blue with him.

A murder in New York: the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features have been ripped from her face, her teeth are missing, her fingerprints gone. The rooms has been sprayed with DNA-eradictaing spray. Someone has seemingly committed the perfect crime using the techniques outlined in Pilgrim’s book.

A terrorist, known only as The Arab, was radicalised when, as a young boy, he witnessed the beheading of his father in a public square in Saudi Arabia. He has dedicated his life to destroying the special relationship between the Kingdom and the United States. He learnt his trade fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and now from hiding in Germany plots a terrible act of mass murder.

When NYPD detective Ben Bradley tracks down Pilgrim, neither man can imagine the terrifying journey they are about to begin, as what begins as an unusual and challenging murder investigation leads them into a direct collision course with the dark forces of jihadist terrorism.

12. Nomad (James Swallow)

Someone has betrayed your country and murdered your friends. You’re the only suspect. And the only one who can stop them striking again…

Marc Dane is a MI6 field agent at home behind a computer screen, one step away from the action. But when a brutal attack on his team leaves Marc as the only survivor – and with the shocking knowledge that there are traitors inside MI6 – he’s forced into the front line.

However the evidence seems to point towards Marc as the perpetrator of the attack. Accused of betraying his country, he must race against time to clear his name. With nowhere to turn to for help and no one left to trust, Marc is forced to rely on the elusive Rubicon group and their operative Lucy Keyes. Ex US Army, Lucy also knows what it’s like to be an outsider, and she’s got the skills that Marc is sorely lacking.

A terrorist attack is coming, one bigger and more deadly than has ever been seen before. With the eyes of the security establishment elsewhere, only Lucy and Marc can stop the attack before it’s too late.

13. All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doer)

***WINNER OF THE 2016 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION***

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

14. A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)

When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.

A Little Life is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.

15. Little Breton Bistro (Nina George)

Marianne Messman longs to escape her loveless marriage to an uncaring husband – an artillery sergeant major named Lothar. On a day trip to Paris, Marianne decides to leap off the Pont Neuf into the Seine, but she is saved from drowning by a homeless man. While recovering in hospital, Marianne comes across a painting of the tiny port town of Kerdruc in Brittany and decides to try her luck on the coast.

In Kerdruc, Marianne meets a host of colourful characters who all gravitate around the restaurant of AR MOR (The Sea). It is this cast of true Bretons who become Marianne’s new family, and among whom she will find love once again. But with her husband looking to pull her back to her old life, Marianne is left with a choice: to step back into the known, or to take a huge jump into an exciting and unpredictable future.

A heart-warming story of romance and adventure from the internationally bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop.

16. The Birdman’s Wife (Melissa Ashley)

Artist Elizabeth Gould spent her life capturing the sublime beauty of birds the world had never seen before. But her legacy was eclipsed by the fame of her husband, John Gould. The Birdman’s Wife at last gives voice to a passionate and adventurous spirit who was so much more than the woman behind the man.

Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover, helpmate, and mother to an ever-growing brood of children. In a golden age of discovery, her artistry breathed wondrous life into countless exotic new species, including Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

In The Birdman’s Wife a naïve young girl who falls in love with an ambitious genius comes into her own as a woman, an artist and a bold adventurer who defies convention by embarking on a trailblazing expedition to the colonies to discover Australia’s ‘curious’ birdlife.

An indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman overlooked by history – until now.

17. Jasper Jones (Craig Silvey)

Artist Elizabeth Gould spent her life capturing the sublime beauty of birds the world had never seen before. But her legacy was eclipsed by the fame of her husband, John Gould. The Birdman’s Wife at last gives voice to a passionate and adventurous spirit who was so much more than the woman behind the man.

Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover, helpmate, and mother to an ever-growing brood of children. In a golden age of discovery, her artistry breathed wondrous life into countless exotic new species, including Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

In The Birdman’s Wife a naïve young girl who falls in love with an ambitious genius comes into her own as a woman, an artist and a bold adventurer who defies convention by embarking on a trailblazing expedition to the colonies to discover Australia’s ‘curious’ birdlife.

An indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman overlooked by history – until now.

18. The Girl You Left Behind (Jojo Moyes)

What happened to the girl you left behind?

France, 1916. Sophie Lefevre must keep her family safe whilst her adored husband Edouard fights at the front. When she is ordered to serve the German officers who descend on her hotel each evening, her home becomes riven by fierce tensions. And from the moment the new Kommandant sets eyes on Sophie’s portrait – painted by Edouard – a dangerous obsession is born, which will lead Sophie to make a dark and terrible decision.

Almost a century later, and Sophie’s portrait hangs in the home of Liv Halston, a wedding gift from her young husband before he died. A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and its troubled history. A history that is about to resurface and turn Liv’s life upside down all over again…

Two young women, separated by a century, are united in their determination to fight for what they love most – whatever the cost. A hauntingly romantic and utterly irresistible new weepy from Jojo Moyes, author of the bestseller, Me Before You.

19. A Hundred Small Lessons (Ashley Hay)

Luminous and deeply affecting, A Hundred Small Lessons is about the many small decisions – the invisible moments – that come to make a life. The intertwined lives of two women from different generations tell a rich and intimate story of how we feel what it is to be human, and how place can transform who we are. It takes account of what it means to be mother or daughter; father or son. It’s a story of love, and of life.

When Elsie Gormley falls and is forced to leave her Brisbane home of sixty-two years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, with their new life – new house, new city, new baby. Lucy and her husband Ben are struggling to transform from adventurous lovers to new parents and seek to smooth the rough edges of their present with memories of their past as they try to discover their future selves.

In her nearby nursing home, Elsie revisits the span of her life – the moments she can’t bear to let go; the haunts to which she might yet return. Her memories of marriage, motherhood, love and death are intertwined with her old house, whose rooms seem to breathe Elsie’s secrets into Lucy.

Through one hot, wet Brisbane summer, seven lives – and two different slices of time – wind along with the flow of the river, as two families chart the ways in which we come, sudden and oblivious, into each other’s stories, and the unexpected ripples that flow out from those chance encounters.

1. The Dry
Jane Harper

***WINNER OF THE 2017 INDIE AWARDS FOR BOOK OF THE YEAR AND BEST DEBUT FICTION ***

Who really killed the Hadler family?

Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well …

When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.

And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds are reopened. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret … A secret Falk thought long-buried … A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface …

2. To Know My CrimeFiona Capp

Having lost all his family’s money in ill-advised investments during the GFC, Ned is reduced to squatting in a boatshed in wealthy Portsea. He is avoiding the world, particularly his sister, Angela, who after an accident, is now a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair, and completely dependent on both her carer, Mai, and Ned – not to mention the income from their family investments.

But one day, Ned overhears a conversation between a millionaire property developer and a politician, and realizes that this might be his opportunity to restore their fortunes … if he has the nerve.

A nail-biting and compelling story of risk, blackmail and the corrosive nature of guilt – and how we all have to live with the consequences of our actions.

3. Jasper JonesCraig Silvey

Full of unforgettable characters, a page-turning pace and outrageously good dialogue, this is a glorious novel – thoughtful, funny, heartbreaking and wise – about outsiders and secrets, and what it really means to be a hero.

Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.

Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother, falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.

And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.

4. The Good PeopleHannah Kent

The fires on the hills smouldered orange as the women left, pockets charged with ashes to guard them from the night. Watching them fade into the grey fall of snow, Nance thought she could hear Maggie’s voice. A whisper in the dark.

“Some folk are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with a skin a little thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.”

Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of her four-year-old grandson, Micheál. The boy cannot walk, or speak, and Nora, mistrustful of the tongues of gossips, has kept the child hidden from those who might see in his deformity evidence of otherworldly interference.

Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a fourteen-year-old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow’s house.

Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person in the valley who might be able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that old Nance Roche has the knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they have taken…

5. Truly Madly GuiltyLiane Moriarty

Clementine is haunted by regret. It was just a barbeque. They didn’t even know their hosts that well, they were friends of friends. They could so easily have said no.

But she and her husband Sam said yes, and now they can never change what they did and didn’t do that Sunday afternoon.

Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One playful dog. It’s an ordinary weekend in the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong?

Marriage, sex, parenthood and friendship: Liane Moriarty takes these elements of our lives and shows us how guilt can expose the fault lines in any relationship, and it is not until we appreciate the fragility of life that we can truly value what we have.

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to fall in love again. Meanwhile, April is struggling through her own directionless life; Lawrence’s reckless past decisions are catching up with him; and Ester and April’s mother, Hilary, is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with the evocative and powerful prose Blain is known for, Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art. Ultimately, it is a joyous tribute to the beauty of being alive.

7. The Last Painting Of Sara De VosDominic Smith

***WINNER OF THE 2017 INDIE AWARD FOR BEST FICTION***

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain-a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the Manhattan bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she’s curating an exhibition of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.

As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.

In this extraordinary novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Australian writer Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

8. Big Little LiesLiane Moriarty

The internationally bestselling author turns her unique gaze on the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves every day and what really goes on behind closed suburban doors.

‘I guess it started with the mothers.’‘It was all just a terrible misunderstanding.’‘I’ll tell you exactly why it happened.’

Pirriwee Public’s annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. A parent is dead. Was it murder, a tragic accident… or something else entirely?

Big Little Lies is a funny, heartbreaking, challenging story of ex-husbands and second wives, new friendships, old betrayals and and schoolyard politics.

‘Let me be clear. This is not a circus. This is a murder investigation.’

9. The RestorerMichael Sala

After a year apart, Maryanne returns to her husband, Roy, bringing their eight-year-old son Daniel and his teenage sister Freya with her. The family move from Sydney to Newcastle, where Roy has bought a derelict house on the coast. As Roy painstakingly patches the holes in the floorboards and plasters over cracks in the walls, Maryanne believes, for a while, that they can rebuild a life together.

But Freya doesn’t want a fresh start—she just wants out—and Daniel drifts around the sprawling, run-down house in a dream, infuriating his father, who soon forgets the promises he has made.

Some cracks can never be smoothed over, and tension grows between Roy and Maryanne until their uneasy peace is ruptured—with devastating consequences.

10. Burial RitesHannah Kent

Set against Iceland’s stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes’s death looms, the farmer’s wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they’ve heard.

Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?

11. I Am PilgrimTerry Hayes

Pilgrim was the codename for a world class and legendary secret agent.

The adopted son of a wealthy New York family, he was once head of a secret internal affairs force for US intelligence and held the title ‘Rider of the Blue’. He wrote the definitive book on forensic investigation before disappearing into an anonymous retirement, taking the secrets of the Rider of the Blue with him.

A murder in New York: the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features have been ripped from her face, her teeth are missing, her fingerprints gone. The rooms has been sprayed with DNA-eradictaing spray. Someone has seemingly committed the perfect crime using the techniques outlined in Pilgrim’s book.

A terrorist, known only as The Arab, was radicalised when, as a young boy, he witnessed the beheading of his father in a public square in Saudi Arabia. He has dedicated his life to destroying the special relationship between the Kingdom and the United States. He learnt his trade fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and now from hiding in Germany plots a terrible act of mass murder.

When NYPD detective Ben Bradley tracks down Pilgrim, neither man can imagine the terrifying journey they are about to begin, as what begins as an unusual and challenging murder investigation leads them into a direct collision course with the dark forces of jihadist terrorism.

12. After YouJojo Moyes

“You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. But I hope you feel a bit exhilarated too. Live boldly. Push yourself. Don’t settle. Just live well. Just live. Love, Will.”
How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?

Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.

Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding-the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future. . . .

For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await. The much anticipated sequel to Me Before You.

13. Our Souls At NightKent Haruf

Addie Moore’s husband died years ago, so did Louis Waters’ wife, and, as neighbours in Holt, Colorado they have naturally long been aware of each other. With their children now far away both live alone in houses empty of family. The nights are terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk to. Then one evening Addie pays Louis an unexpected visit. Their brave adventures-their pleasures and their difficulties-form the beating heart of Our Souls at Night.

Kent Haruf’s final novel is an exquisite and moving story about love and growing old with grace. It is a lasting tribute to the extraordinary author who wrote it.

14. The Birdman’s WifeMelissa Ashley

Artist Elizabeth Gould spent her life capturing the sublime beauty of birds the world had never seen before. But her legacy was eclipsed by the fame of her husband, John Gould. The Birdman’s Wife at last gives voice to a passionate and adventurous spirit who was so much more than the woman behind the man.

Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover, helpmate, and mother to an ever-growing brood of children. In a golden age of discovery, her artistry breathed wondrous life into countless exotic new species, including Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

In The Birdman’s Wife a naïve young girl who falls in love with an ambitious genius comes into her own as a woman, an artist and a bold adventurer who defies convention by embarking on a trailblazing expedition to the colonies to discover Australia’s ‘curious’ birdlife.

An indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman overlooked by history – until now.

15. Innocent BloodP.D James

Philippa Palfrey, adopted as a child, believes herself to be the motherless, illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic father. At eighteen she exercises her right to find out the truth. What she discovers will change her life forever.

Philippa enters a new and terrifying world and soon comes to realize that she is not the only one interested in her parents’ whereabouts.

Innocent Blood is both a mystery and a thriller, a superb novel that explores the themes of self-identity and the meaning of life.

16. The Husband’s SecretLiane Moriarty

Cecilia Fitzpatrick, devoted mother, successful Tupperware business owner and efficient P&C President, has found a letter from her husband.

“For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick, to be opened only in the event of my death”

But Cecilia’s husband isn’t dead, he’s on a business trip. And when she questions him about it on the phone, Cecilia senses something she hasn’t experienced before. John-Paul is lying.

What happens next changes Cecilia’s formerly blissful suburban existence forever, and the consequences will be life-changing for the most unexpected people.

17. The Light between OceansM.L.Stedman

They break the rules and follow their hearts. What happens next will break yours.

1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world.

Then one April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant – and the path of the couple’s lives hits an unthinkable crossroads.

Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day – as the baby’s real story unfolds …

18. HoldingGraeme Norton

The remote Irish village of Duneen has known little drama; and yet its inhabitants are troubled. Sergeant PJ Collins hasn’t always been this overweight; mother of two Brid Riordan hasn’t always been an alcoholic; and elegant Evelyn Ross hasn’t always felt that her life was a total waste. So when human remains are discovered on an old farm, suspected to be that of Tommy Burke – a former love of both Brid and Evelyn – the village’s dark past begins to unravel. As the frustrated PJ struggles to solve a genuine case for the first time in his life, he unearths a community’s worth of anger and resentments, secrets and regret.

Darkly comic, touching and at times profoundly sad. Graham Norton employs his acerbic wit to breathe life into a host of lovable characters, and explore – with searing honesty – the complexities and contradictions that make us human.

19. The WhistlerJohn Grisham

The most corrupt judge in US history.

A young investigator with a secret informant.

The electrifying new thriller.

Lacy Stoltz never expected to be in the firing line. Investigating judicial misconduct by Florida’s one thousand judges, her cases so far have been relatively unexciting. That’s until she meets Greg Myers, an indicted lawyer with an assumed name, who has an extraordinary tale to tell.

Myers is representing a whistle blower who knows of a judge involved in organised crime. Along with her gangster associates this judge has facilitated the building of a casino on an Indian reservation. At least two people who opposed the scheme are dead. Since the casino was built, the judge has made several fortunes off undeclared winnings. She owns property around the world, hires private jets to take her where she wishes, and her secret vaults are overflowing with rare books, art and jewels.

No one has a clue what she’s been doing – until now.

Under Florida law, those who help the state recover illegally acquired assets stand to gain a large percentage of them. Myers and his whistle blower friend could make millions.

But first they need Lacy to start an investigation. Is she ready to pit herself against the most corrupt judge in American history, a judge whose associates think nothing of murder?

20. The Better SonKatherine Johnson

1952. Tasmania. The green, rolling hills of the dairy town Mole Creek have a dark underside — a labyrinthine underworld of tunnels that stretch for countless miles, caverns the size of cathedrals and underground rivers that flood after heavy rain. The caves are dangerous places, forbidden to children. But this is Tasmania — an island at the end of the earth. Here, rules are made to be broken.

For two young brothers, a hidden cave a short walk from the family farm seems the perfect escape from their abusive, shell-shocked father — until the older brother goes missing. Fearful of his father, nine-year-old Kip lies about what happened. It is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Fifty years later, Kip — now an award-winning scientist — has a young son of his own, but cannot look at him without seeing his lost brother, Tommy. On a mission of atonement, he returns to the cave they called Kubla to discover if it’s ever too late to set things right. To have a second chance. To be the father he never had.

The Better Son is a richly imaginative and universal story about the danger of secrets, the beauty in forgiveness and the enthralling power of Tasmania’s unique natural landscapes.

1. The Barefoot Investor
Scott Pape

This is the only money guide you’ll ever need.

That’s a bold claim, given there are already thousands of finance books on the shelves.

So what makes this one different?

Well, you won’t be overwhelmed with a bunch of ‘tips’ … or a strict budget (that you won’t follow). You’ll get a step-by-step formula: open this account, then do this; call this person, and say this; invest money here, and not there. All with a glass of wine in your hand.

This book will show you how to create an entire financial plan that is so simple you can sketch it on the back of a serviette … and you’ll be able to manage your money in 10 minutes a week.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

This book is full of stories from everyday Aussies — single people, young families, empty nesters, retirees — who have applied the simple steps in this book and achieved amazing, life-changing results.

And you’re next.

2. CSIRO Low Carb Diet
Grant Brinkworth

Based on emerging research from around the world, as well as original CSIRO research recently conducted in Australia, the low-carb diet has proved successful in managing lifestyle-induced metabolic diseases, including unhealthy weight gain and type 2 diabetes. The diet lowers the proportion of carbohydrate relative to protein and unsaturated ‘healthy’ fat, and encourages participants to follow a regular exercise routine.

This easy-to-follow, comprehensive lifestyle plan integrates these principles and can help you not only to reach your weight-loss goals, but also to maximise its benefits for improved metabolic health, blood glucose control and diabetes management.

3. Lion: A Long Way Home
Saroo Brierley

When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines.

Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five. Not knowing the name of his family or where he was from, he survived for weeks on the streets of Kolkata, before being taken into an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia.

Despite being happy in his new family, Saroo always wondered about his origins. He spent hours staring at the map of India on his bedroom wall. When he was a young man the advent of Google Earth led him to pore over satellite images of the country for landmarks he recognised. And one day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for.

Then he set off on a journey to find his mother.

Lion: A Long Way Home is a moving and inspirational true story that celebrates the importance of never letting go of what drives the human spirit – hope. Now a major motion picture starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara.

4. Everywhere I Look
Helen Garner

I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there’s a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring.

Helen Garner is one of Australia’s greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice.

Everywhere I Look includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life.

5. Fifteen Young Men
Paul Kennedy

It was a maritime tragedy that unfolded one sad, dark hour at a time. A cold, cruelly blustery night revealing – with agonising slowness – that fifteen young men of the Mornington Football Club would never make it home. As dawn broke and families began to mourn, a nation was to learn the full extent of one of the world’s worst sporting disasters.

The sinking of the Process in catastrophically rough seas off Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 1892, with the loss of all on board, horrified Australia. ‘Such an accident has no parallel in our land’s history,’ reported The Argus. Yet somehow, for more than a century, this calamitous event slipped from Australia’s consciousness.

In Fifteen Young Men, journalist Paul Kennedy reveals the stories behind the tragedy. In his compelling evocation of a spirited Australian town on the cusp of a new century, he captures the trauma of families and friends suffering almost unbearable loss, but also the irrepressible optimism of the times, and the mateship, love and resilience that would come to define a budding nation.

6. Trigger Warning
Bill Leak

Bill Leak’s daily cartoons in The Australian newspaper have been variously described as the works of a genius and Australia’s most insightful and thought-provoking arbiter of the main story of the day. Thumbing through Trigger Warning, a collection of Bill’s cartoons from 2016, it’s easy to argue that those terms have not been used loosely.

7. Fight Like A Girl
Clementine Ford

A friend recently told me that the things I write are powerful for her because they have the effect of making her feel angry instead of just empty. I want to do this for all women and young girls – to take the emptiness and numbness they feel about being a girl in this world and turn it into rage and power. I want to teach all of them how to FIGHT LIKE A GIRL.

Online sensation, fearless feminist heroine and scourge of trolls and misogynists everywhere, Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to thousands of Australian women and girls. Her incendiary debut Fight Like A Girl is an essential manifesto for feminists new, old and soon-to-be, and exposes just how unequal the world continues to be for women. Crucially, it is a call to arms for all women to rediscover the fury that has been suppressed by a society that still considers feminism a threat.

Fight Like A Girl will make you laugh, cry and scream. But above all it will make you demand and fight for a world in which women have real equality and not merely the illusion of it.

8. Tools Of The Titans
Timothy Ferriss

“For the last two years, I’ve interviewed nearly two hundred world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs and athletes to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview, and the show is on the cusp of passing 100 million downloads.

This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met. What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. This is reflected in the questions. For example: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?

I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something and replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested. Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.

I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”

9. Only
Caroline Baum

Three barely felt like a family. It felt like it did not count. Like we were unfinished. Incomplete. There was always a gap at the table, room to set places for others. Visitors were few and far between. Mostly, there was only me.

Only is a memoir of an unconventional childhood that explores what it means to be an Only Child — as both child and adult. Also what it means to be the daughter of two people damaged by trauma and tragedy, particularly a domineering and explosive father. Secrets are revealed and differences settled.

Caroline Baum’s moving and gripping memoir is for everyone who has felt they are the fulcrum of a seesaw, the focus of all eyes and expectations, torn between love and fear, obedience and rebellion, duty and the longing to escape. It is also for anyone who has felt the burden of trying to be a Good Daughter — what that means and why it is so hard. Revelatory, lyrical and unflinching.

10. Hidden Figures
Margot Lee Shetterley

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.

11. Penguin Bloom
Cameron Bloom

Penguin Bloom is a unique journey of recovery and an extraordinary celebration of life, featuring Cameron Bloom’s exceptional photographs and a captivating narrative by New York Times bestselling author Bradley Trevor Greive. Penguin the Magpie is a global social media sensation with over 113k followers on Instagram. People the world over have fallen in love with the stunning and deeply personal images of this rescued bird and her human family.

But there is far more to Penguin’s story than meets the eye. This is a true story of hope and courage. It begins with a shocking accident, in which Cameron’s wife, Sam, suffers a near fatal fall that leaves her paralysed and deeply depressed. Into their lives comes Penguin, an injured magpie chick abandoned after she fell from her nest.

Penguin’s rescue and the incredible joy and strength she gives Sam and all those who helped her survive demonstrates that, however bleak things seem, compassion, friendship and support can come from unexpected quarters, ensuring there are always better days ahead. This plucky little magpie reminds us all that, no matter how lost, fragile or damaged we feel, accepting the love of others and loving them in return will help to make us whole.

12. Bitten By An Elelphant
Gordon Lewis

At the age of 65 Gordon Lewis was described by an enraged senior judge as a ‘bloody maverick!’ He took comfort from this assessment as he felt it confirmed that he was on the right track …

Gordon Lewis loves the humanity of the Law. That affection has led him to a legal career of great diversity. Whether as Director of the Victorian Law Institute, sitting as a County Court Judge, regular presentations on radio, guest speaker at both overseas and Australian conferences, or his role as Cricket Australia’s Senior Code of Conduct Commissioner, his name has become almost as well known to the general public as it is to the legal profession.

Known for his warmth, compassion and quick wit, he has devoted many years to assisting and advising young lawyers. The textbook he originally co-authored with Justice Kyrou, Handy Hints on Legal Practice, was once described as the only legal textbook to ever make the readers laugh. Several years ago he decided to write ‘a funny book about the law and his life so far’. This book is the result. Whether it is the law stripped of its pomposity, cricket, film reviewing, greyhounds or just coping with life’s exigencies, the self-deprecatory humour in these pages gives a rare insight into the author’s kindness and sense of fun. You might also think that apart from writing ‘a funny book’, almost coincidentally the author has recorded a testament to overcoming personal adversity.

13. Food To Make You Glow
Lola Berry

Whether you’re looking to boost energy levels, manage stress or achieve healthy and sustainable weight loss, eating the right food is a crucial piece of the puzzle. In Food to Make You Glow, nutritionist Lola Berry shares the key whole foods to support specific health goals: happiness, energy, beauty, immunity, calming, weight loss and detox.

As well as 90 delicious recipes based around these wholefood heroes, Lola recommends the best herbal teas, lifestyle tips, exercises and activities for each health goal. Want to keep the baddies at bay and support your immune system? Go for recipes featuring immune-boosting red meat, garlic or seeds, such as the Lucky Lamb Chops with Green Pea Smash or Coconut Fruit Whip with Almond and Seed Toffee. Need to give your hair, skin and nails some love? The Raw Rainbow Pasta with Brazil Nut and Spinach Pesto or Salted Macadamia Nut Slice are high in good fats and antioxidants.

Get inspired about the positive effects whole foods can have on your health, and start cooking food to make you glow!

14. Buddhism For Break-ups
Meshel Laurie

What would Buddha do?

Buddhist philosophy has helped radio, television and comedy star Meshel Laurie survive many life crises. But when she found herself facing the end of her nineteen-year marriage, she realised there were no Buddhist books about break-ups. So she wrote one.

Using Buddhism as a roadmap for navigating the fear, loneliness and grief of a broken heart, Meshel explains how the concepts of Emptiness and Impermanence can help us to see things clearly. With her wry humour and trademark honesty, she shares how one of her biggest challenges turned out to be a golden opportunity for personal growth and greater happiness.

Whether you’re dealing with the breakdown of a marriage, the demise of a relationship or the disintegration of a friendship, Buddhism for Break-ups is your go-to guide for zen!

15. Elon Musk
Ashlee Vance

South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior.

The personal tale of Musk’s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties. He started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk’s marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life …

Elon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk- How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.

16. Eat This, My Friend
Jade Odonahoo

When Jade O’Donahoo sold her tiny but acclaimed hole-in-the-wall café, Switch Board, in the heart of Melbourne, she wanted to share the secrets of her favourite dishes. She wrote down the recipes, compiling them as a gift to loyal customers and friends. Beautiful illustrations followed, and the project evolved, first to a blog, and ultimately to this little book.

Eat This, My Friend is Jade’s collection of more than 60 lovingly illustrated recipes for versatile, healthy veggie dishes that are fuss-free – and especially good when shared with friends. From the delicious and healthy Choc-tahini spread or Labneh + beetroot bagel that will get you through breakfast with a breeze, to Lemony broccoli quinoa salad, or a Peperonata tart that will stave off the lunchtime hunger pangs, and meals such as Thai-style pumpkin soup or Lentil shepherd’s pie that will keep you satisfied for dinner, Eat This, My Friend has you covered for every occasion. A whole chapter is set aside for sides, a meal that is often overlooked, with Raw zucchini agrodolce or Honey + harissa glazed sweet potato, then its onto sweet treats such as Apricot + coconut bliss balls or Lemon, yoghurt + polenta muffins. Jade also offers handy tips on kitchen equipment, staples for your pantry and recipes to make your own condiments and sauces.

Eat This, My Friend is the result of 15 years of collecting recipes, drawing and illustrating, of cooking and tasting and sharing; a book that will help you realise that incredible food need not be complicated or time consuming, nor do you need to be a chef to be able to prepare it; a book that makes you actually want to cook.

17. Insomniac City
Bill Hayes

Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance–“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life,” he tells Hayes early on–is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes’s distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

18. Eight Week Blood Sugar Diet
Michael Mosley

Everywhere we look in the world today, we are encouraged to treat ourselves to foods and drinks that are damaging our bodies. Eating low-quality carbohydrates produces a constant overload of sugar in our blood stream that furs up the arteries and piles fat into our internal organs. The result has been a doubling in the number of type-2 diabetics over the last few decades, as well as a surge in those with the potentially hazardous condition, pre-diabetes.

It is now known that even moderately elevated blood sugar levels can trigger a range of life-threatening diseases, including cancer, heart disease and dementia. Scientists in the UK have recently made a revolutionary discovery. They have not only identified an important cause of type-2 diabetes but have demonstrated in medical trials that you can prevent and even reverse the condition.

In this book Dr Michael Mosley, the medical journalist who alerted the world to the benefits of intermittent fasting draws on the work of Professor Roy Taylor – one of the UK’s foremost diabetes experts – to present a radical new solution to ‘diabesity’. He explains the science of how and why rapid weight loss combats blood sugar problems, and offers a clear, precise plan – complete with delicious, healthy recipes and menu plans – to enable you to regain your health and then stay on track – medication free. As Dr Mosley says, it is never too late to act…

19. Vegetables
Antonio Carluccio

Like most Italians, the great Antonio Carluccio loves vegetables. In this book he turns his attention to his favourites, and many others, adding up to over 100 different varieties.

He researches the botanical family of each type of vegetable, its history, describes in loving detail how to buy and prepare it – and in over 150 recipes tells us how to make the most of the humble veg, whether eaten raw, cooked or preserved.

There are pastas with vegetables, soups, vegetable bakes and salads, risottos, pickles, stews, tarts and dips. There are even some sweet cakes and biscuits based around vegetables.

The Italian way with vegetables is renowned the world over, the Carluccio way with vegetables is unsurpassed, and this book is an essential for every kitchen.

20. Whole New Way To Eat
Vladia Cobrdova

Step into fad-free whole-food eating with recipes you can trust from the original modern Australian health food providore.

A Whole New Way to Eat is the healthy recipe collection all households need. Everyone is welcome at the table with this way of eating – whether you’re looking for inspirational vegan, paleo or vegetarian recipes or you’re simply after truly delicious food that just happens to be good for you. From The Best Turmeric Yoghurt and Tahini Potato Salad to the hands-down most delicious Raw Caramel Slice you’ve ever tried, your body will thank you from your tastebuds to your gut. Nutritionist and recipe developer Vladia Cobrdova from About Life recreates over 135 of the mouth-watering dishes she’s made popular in the stores’ busy cafes, takeaway and ready-made meal sections.

A Whole New Way to Eat is a modern take on healthy eating for those more interested in eating well than following the latest craze.

The awards are uniquely judged and voted for by Australia’s independent booksellers,
recognising the great breadth and depth of talent in Australian writing.

BOOK OF THE YEAR / BEST DEBUT FICTION

The DryJane Harper

Who really killed the Hadler family?

Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well …

When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.

And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds are reopened. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret … A secret Falk thought long-buried … A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface …

STAFF REVIEW BY SUZIE:

The Dry is a compelling thriller set in drought-stricken rural Australia, where a murder-suicide is not what it seems. This book keeps you intrigued and guessing right to the end. Unputdownable, this is one of the best debut novels I have ever read.

BEST FICTION

The Last Painting of Sara De Vos
Dominic Smith

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted to the Guild of St. Luke in Holland as a master painter, the first woman to be so honoured. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain-a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the Manhattan bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her. Because now, half a century later, she’s curating an exhibition of female Dutch painters, and both versions threaten to arrive.

As the three threads intersect with increasing and exquisite suspense, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos mesmerises while it grapples with the demands of the artistic life, showing how the deceits of the past can forge the present.

In this extraordinary novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Australian writer Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

STAFF REVIEW BY IAN:

An intriguing mystery revolving around the lives of two women artists from different centuries, the book centres around lost paintings and art forgery. This is a very polished and well constructed story from a new Australian author.

BEST NON-FICTION

Everywhere I Look
Helen Garner

I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there’s a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring.

Helen Garner is one of Australia’s greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice.

Everywhere I Look includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life.

STAFF REVIEW BY SUZIE:

A considered, intimate and honest collection of essays by Helen Garner. I was absorbed by her reflections of the mundane intricacies of everyday life as she mused on her life experiences and influences. The book was an important reminder that there are many things in our everyday which are worthy of discussion and reflection, and that we should open ourselves to empathy for others undergoing unbearable pressure.

BEST CHILDREN’S

Circle
Jeannie Baker

Tiny godwit birds follow ancient, invisible pathways in an infinity of sky. Flying on and on, for nine nights and nine days, flying without rest. From Arctic icebergs in the north, to tropical golden beaches in the south, across thousands of kilometres of Pacific Ocean. ‘Circle’ captures the sheer wonder of this migratory journey, reminding us of the global interdependence of nature.

The Godwit’s remarkable flight is followed as it comes full circle… back to the place where mud and sand become sea.

STAFF REVIEW BY LILY:

Circle captures the sheer wonder of the migratory journey of the godwit. From Arctic icebergs in the north, to tropical golden beaches in the south, it reminds us of the global interdependence of nature and mankind. The beautiful, poetic text features a simple narrative that follows the birds through their generational life cycle. A wonderful non-fiction picture book suitable for younger and older children.

BEST YOUNG ADULT

Words in Deep BlueCath Crowley

Second-hand bookshops are full of mysteries

This is a love story.

It’s the story of Howling Books, where readers write letters to strangers, to lovers, to poets, to words.

It’s the story of Henry Jones and Rachel Sweetie. They were best friends once, before Rachel moved to the sea.

Now, she’s back, working at the bookstore, grieving for her brother Cal. She’s looking for the future in the books people love, and the words that they leave behind.

Sometimes you need the poets

The new novel from the award-winning author of Graffiti Moon.

STAFF REVIEW BY ROMY:

Three years ago Rachel left the city and moved to the sea, leaving behind her best friend Henry. Now, Rachel has returned to Melbourne to grieve the death of her brother Cal while trying to find answers in a ‘letter library’ where she’s working at Henry’s family’s bookstore. But a lot can change in three years and Rachel must navigate the new territory of her old friendships before she can start looking to the future. Set in Melbourne, this is an honest and hopeful novel about grief, love and life that will have you laughing and crying in equal measure. An essential read for book lovers everywhere.

FICTION

The Animators
Kayla Rae Whitaker

From age eighteen on, I had a partner, a kindred spirit. I had a friend. Someone bound and determined to keep me from the worst in myself.

At a private East Coast college, two young women meet in art class. Sharon, ambitious but lacking confidence, arrives from rural Kentucky. Mel, brash and wildly gifted, brings her own brand of hellfire from the backwaters of Florida. Both outsiders, Sharon and Mel become fervent friends, bonding over their love of classic cartoons, their dysfunctional working-class families, and — above all — their craft: drawing. Mel, to understand her tumultuous past, and Sharon, to lose herself altogether.

A decade later, Sharon and Mel are an award-winning animation duo, living and working in Brooklyn, and poised on the edge of even greater success after the release of their first full-length feature. But with this success comes self-doubt, and cracks in their relationship start to form. When unexpected tragedy strikes, long-buried resentments rise to the surface, hastening a reckoning no one sees coming.

Funny and heartbreaking by turn, The Animators is a dazzling story of female friendship, the cost of a creative life, and the secrets that can undo us.

Exit West
Mohsin Hamid

In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, Saeed and Nadia share a cup of coffee, and he makes her smile. A few days later they go for dinner, and over time they share many more meals. They try not to notice the sound of bombs getting closer every night, the radio announcing new laws, the public executions.

Eventually the problem is too big to ignore: it’s not safe for Nadia to live alone, she must move in with Saeed’s family, even though they are not married and that too is a problem. Meanwhile, rumours are spreading of strange black doors in secret places across the city, doors that lead to London or San Francisco, Greece or Dubai. One day soon, when the streets are no longer usable, the time will come for Nadia and Saeed to seek out one such door, joining the great outpouring of those fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world.

From the bestselling, Man Booker shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an astonishing new novel.

The Restorer
Michael Sala

After a year apart, Maryanne returns to her husband, Roy, bringing their eight-year-old son Daniel and his teenage sister Freya with her. The family move from Sydney to Newcastle, where Roy has bought a derelict house on the coast. As Roy painstakingly patches the holes in the floorboards and plasters over cracks in the walls, Maryanne believes, for a while, that they can rebuild a life together.

But Freya doesn’t want a fresh start—she just wants out—and Daniel drifts around the sprawling, run-down house in a dream, infuriating his father, who soon forgets the promises he has made.

Some cracks can never be smoothed over, and tension grows between Roy and Maryanne until their uneasy peace is ruptured—with devastating consequences.

To Know My Crime
Fiona Capp

Having lost all his family’s money in ill-advised investments during the GFC, Ned is reduced to squatting in a boatshed in wealthy Portsea. He is avoiding the world, particularly his sister, Angela, who after an accident, is now a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair, and completely dependent on both her carer, Mai, and Ned – not to mention the income from their family investments.

But one day, Ned overhears a conversation between a millionaire property developer and a politician, and realizes that this might be his opportunity to restore their fortunes … if he has the nerve.

A nail-biting and compelling story of risk, blackmail and the corrosive nature of guilt – and how we all have to live with the consequences of our actions.

Ragdoll
Daniel Cole

A body is discovered with the dismembered parts of six victims stitched together like a puppet, nicknamed by the press as the ‘ragdoll’. Assigned to the shocking case are Detective William ‘Wolf’ Fawkes, recently reinstated to the London Met, and his former partner Detective Emily Baxter.

The ‘Ragdoll Killer’ taunts the police by releasing a list of names to the media, and the dates on which he intends to murder them. With six people to save, can Fawkes and Baxter catch a killer when the world is watching their every move?

A pulse-pounding, gripping police procedural with the pace of a thriller. The beginning of an exciting new series starring detectives Wolf and Baxter.

Do You Love Me or What?
Sue Woolfe

A collection of eight sparkling, nuanced short stories from one of Australia’s most celebrated and loved writers. Written in elegant, shimmering prose, Sue’s stories are woven with themes encompassing love, loss and yearning, memory and identity, the desert and water, and people who live on the periphery of society. Her sentences are spare and evocative, yet paint fully realised pictures that speak of the poignant, shared experiences of the nature of relationships, past and present.

NON FICTION

Insomniac City
Bill Hayes

Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.
And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance–“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life,” he tells Hayes early on–is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes’s distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

LovelandsDr Debra Campbell

Love is a wild and diverse land. Every soul needs a map.

Nothing is more important to us than love, yet nothing is more painful than love gone wrong. During the course of our lives, we can develop dangerous faultlines and crevasses in our inner emotional landscapes due to past hurts, losses and disappointments.

Lovelands is psychologist Dr Debra Campbell’s map for traversing the treacherous terrain of love and cultivating the wisdom and self-compassion for healthy love relationships.

Drawing on her own knowledge and experiences of dysfunctional love relationships throughout her life and work, Dr Campbell shows you how to become aware of your personal Lovelands so you can locate and identify your faultlines, avoid repeating negative patterns and become empowered to make different choices.

Whether you’re a parent to others, a lover to another, or working on the care of your own soul, Lovelands will help you make sense of love, from birth to death, and guide you in claiming the role of the hero of your own life and sovereign of your own Lovelands.

Only
Caroline Baum

Three barely felt like a family. It felt like it did not count. Like we were unfinished. Incomplete. There was always a gap at the table, room to set places for others. Visitors were few and far between. Mostly, there was only me.

Only is a memoir of an unconventional childhood that explores what it means to be an Only Child — as both child and adult. Also what it means to be the daughter of two people damaged by trauma and tragedy, particularly a domineering and explosive father. Secrets are revealed and differences settled.

Caroline Baum’s moving and gripping memoir is for everyone who has felt they are the fulcrum of a seesaw, the focus of all eyes and expectations, torn between love and fear, obedience and rebellion, duty and the longing to escape. It is also for anyone who has felt the burden of trying to be a Good Daughter — what that means and why it is so hard. Revelatory, lyrical and unflinching.

Mrs Kelly: The Astonishing Life of Ned Kelly’s Mother
Grantlee Kieza

When Ned Kelly’s mother, Ellen, arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. By the time she died aged ninety-one in 1923, having outlived seven of her twelve children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern, sovereign nation.

Like so many pioneering women, Ellen, the wife of a convict, led a life of great hardship. Born in Ireland during a time of entrenched poverty and sectarian violence, she was a mother of seven when her husband died after months in a police lock-up. She lived through famine and drought, watched her babies die, listened through the prison wall while her eldest son was hanged and saw the charred remains of another of her children who’d died in a shoot-out with police. One son became Australia’s most infamous (and ultimately most celebrated) outlaw; another became a highly decorated policeman, an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a worldwide star on the rodeo circuit. Through it all, ‘the notorious Mrs Kelly’, as she was dubbed by Victoria’s Assistant Police Commissioner, survived as best she could, like so many pioneering women of the time.

By bestselling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia’s most notorious women and her wild family, but it’s also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

1. The Barefoot Investor
Scott Pape

This is the only money guide you’ll ever need.

That’s a bold claim, given there are already thousands of finance books on the shelves.

So what makes this one different?

Well, you won’t be overwhelmed with a bunch of ‘tips’ … or a strict budget (that you won’t follow). You’ll get a step-by-step formula: open this account, then do this; call this person, and say this; invest money here, and not there. All with a glass of wine in your hand.

This book will show you how to create an entire financial plan that is so simple you can sketch it on the back of a serviette … and you’ll be able to manage your money in 10 minutes a week.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

This book is full of stories from everyday Aussies — single people, young families, empty nesters, retirees — who have applied the simple steps in this book and achieved amazing, life-changing results.

And you’re next.

2. Lion: A Long Way Home
Saroo Brierley

When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines.

Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five. Not knowing the name of his family or where he was from, he survived for weeks on the streets of Kolkata, before being taken into an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia.

Despite being happy in his new family, Saroo always wondered about his origins. He spent hours staring at the map of India on his bedroom wall. When he was a young man the advent of Google Earth led him to pore over satellite images of the country for landmarks he recognised. And one day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for.

Then he set off on a journey to find his mother.

Lion: A Long Way Home is a moving and inspirational true story that celebrates the importance of never letting go of what drives the human spirit – hope. Now a major motion picture starring Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara.

3. Fifteen Young Men
Paul Kennedy

It was a maritime tragedy that unfolded one sad, dark hour at a time. A cold, cruelly blustery night revealing – with agonising slowness – that fifteen young men of the Mornington Football Club would never make it home. As dawn broke and families began to mourn, a nation was to learn the full extent of one of the world’s worst sporting disasters.

The sinking of the Process in catastrophically rough seas off Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 1892, with the loss of all on board, horrified Australia. ‘Such an accident has no parallel in our land’s history,’ reported The Argus. Yet somehow, for more than a century, this calamitous event slipped from Australia’s consciousness.

In Fifteen Young Men, journalist Paul Kennedy reveals the stories behind the tragedy. In his compelling evocation of a spirited Australian town on the cusp of a new century, he captures the trauma of families and friends suffering almost unbearable loss, but also the irrepressible optimism of the times, and the mateship, love and resilience that would come to define a budding nation.

4. Bitten By An Elephant
Gordon Lewis

At the age of 65 Gordon Lewis was described by an enraged senior judge as a ‘bloody maverick!’ He took comfort from this assessment as he felt it confirmed that he was on the right track …

Gordon Lewis loves the humanity of the Law. That affection has led him to a legal career of great diversity. Whether as Director of the Victorian Law Institute, sitting as a County Court Judge, regular presentations on radio, guest speaker at both overseas and Australian conferences, or his role as Cricket Australia’s Senior Code of Conduct Commissioner, his name has become almost as well known to the general public as it is to the legal profession.

Known for his warmth, compassion and quick wit, he has devoted many years to assisting and advising young lawyers. The textbook he originally co-authored with Justice Kyrou, Handy Hints on Legal Practice, was once described as the only legal textbook to ever make the readers laugh. Several years ago he decided to write ‘a funny book about the law and his life so far’. This book is the result. Whether it is the law stripped of its pomposity, cricket, film reviewing, greyhounds or just coping with life’s exigencies, the self-deprecatory humour in these pages gives a rare insight into the author’s kindness and sense of fun. You might also think that apart from writing ‘a funny book’, almost coincidentally the author has recorded a testament to overcoming personal adversity.

5. If I Could Tell You Just One Thing
Richard Reed

Richard Reed built Innocent Drinks from a smoothie stall on a street corner to one of the biggest brands in Britain. He credits his success to four brilliant pieces of advice, each given to him just when he needed them most. Ever since, it has been Richard’s habit, whenever he meets somebody he admires, to ask them for their best piece of advice. If they could tell him just one thing, what would it be? Richard has collected pearls of wisdom from some of the most remarkable, inspiring and game-changing people in the world – in business, tech, politics, sport, art, spirituality, medicine, film, and design.

From Richard Branson to Andy Murray, from the president of Google to President Clinton, and from Richard Curtis to Annie Lennox, Richard has picked some of the world’s most interesting brains to give you a lesson in how to live, how to create and how to succeed.

6. Fight Like A Girl
Clementine Ford

A friend recently told me that the things I write are powerful for her because they have the effect of making her feel angry instead of just empty. I want to do this for all women and young girls – to take the emptiness and numbness they feel about being a girl in this world and turn it into rage and power. I want to teach all of them how to FIGHT LIKE A GIRL.

Online sensation, fearless feminist heroine and scourge of trolls and misogynists everywhere, Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to thousands of Australian women and girls. Her incendiary debut Fight Like A Girl is an essential manifesto for feminists new, old and soon-to-be, and exposes just how unequal the world continues to be for women. Crucially, it is a call to arms for all women to rediscover the fury that has been suppressed by a society that still considers feminism a threat.

Fight Like A Girl will make you laugh, cry and scream. But above all it will make you demand and fight for a world in which women have real equality and not merely the illusion of it.

7. Tools Of Titans
Timothy Ferriss

“For the last two years, I’ve interviewed nearly two hundred world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs and athletes to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview, and the show is on the cusp of passing 100 million downloads.

This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met. What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. This is reflected in the questions. For example: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis?

I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something and replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested. Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration.

I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”

8. Light And The Shadow
Mark Colvin

Mark Colvin is a broadcasting legend. He is the voice of ABC Radio’s leading current affairs program PM; he was a founding broadcaster for the groundbreaking youth station Double J; he initiated The World Today program; and he’s one of the most popular and influential journalists in the twittersphere.

Mark has been covering local and global events for more than four decades. He has reported on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy.

Light and Shadow is the incredible story of a father waging a secret war against communism during the Cold War, while his son comes of age as a journalist during the tumultuous Whitlam and Fraser years and embarks on the risky career of a foreign correspondent.

Mark was witness to some of the most world-changing events, including the Iranian hostage crisis, the buildup to the first Gulf War in Iraq and the direct aftermath of the shocking genocide in Rwanda. But when he contracted a life-threatening illness while working in the field, his life changed forever.

Mark Colvin’s engrossing memoir takes you inside the coverage of major news events and gently navigates the complexity of his father’s double life.

9. The Riviera Set
Mary Lovell

A portrait of high society in the twentieth century, told through the stories of the guests of Maxine Elliott and Prince Aly Khan at the Château de l’Horizon in Cannes.

The Riviera Set is the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped and politicked at the Château de l’Horizon near Cannes, over the course of forty years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fashionable in the twenties to the death of the playboy Prince Aly Khan in 1960. At the heart of this was the amazing Maxine Elliott, the daughter of a fisherman from Connecticut, who built the beautiful art deco Château and brought together the likes of Noel Coward, the Aga Khan, the Windsors and two very saucy courtesans, Doris Castlerosse and Daisy Fellowes, who set out to be dangerous distractions to Winston Churchill as he worked on his journalism and biographies during his ‘wilderness years’ in the thirties.

After the War the story continued as the Château changed hands and Prince Aly Khan used it to entertain the Hollywood set, as well as launch his seduction of and eventual marriage to Rita Hayworth.

Mary Lovell tells her story of high society behaviour with tremendous brio and relish, and this book has all the charm and fascination of her bestselling The Mitford Girls and The Churchills.

10. Hidden Figures
Margot Lee Shetterly

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.